Human-Centric Research for NLP: Towards a Definition and Guiding Questions
This work addresses the problem of making NLP research more beneficial for human stakeholders, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the lack of a clear definition for human-centric research in NLP by proposing a working definition and a framework to integrate human-centric components into research pipelines, aiming to steer outcomes to benefit human stakeholders like end users.
With Human-Centric Research (HCR) we can steer research activities so that the research outcome is beneficial for human stakeholders, such as end users. But what exactly makes research human-centric? We address this question by providing a working definition and define how a research pipeline can be split into different stages in which human-centric components can be added. Additionally, we discuss existing NLP with HCR components and define a series of guiding questions, which can serve as starting points for researchers interested in exploring human-centric research approaches. We hope that this work would inspire researchers to refine the proposed definition and to pose other questions that might be meaningful for achieving HCR.